Concerning Beds, Mattresses in Days of Old

1874

During all ages, from the earliest times, men have displayed their invention in designing beds which should gratify their natural love for comfort, for elegance, and for luxury. In the prehistoric times the dwellers in the caves most probably followed the suggestion given them by the animals which they drove out from their rocky dens, in this early stage of the "struggle for existence," and made their beds of leaves. From this condition to providing skins for the coverings of their couches, was a great advance, and with their increasing ability to dominate their surrounding conditions, and provide the materials for gratifying their natural as well as artificial wants, this step was but the first in a long course of invention and improvement applied to beds.

Among the Romans and the Greeks, as well as the other nations of antiquity, such an appliance as a mattress was unknown. They made their beds upon couches of wood, which were covered with skins, furs, woolen and other stuffs. Their luxury in beds consisted only in using more expensive coverings, replacing a sheep's skin by a tiger's or substituting for a rough woolen blanket one of finer texture, or a shawl of silk embroidered in gold and silver thread. These improvements, or those consisting in replacing the wooden bench which formed their support with one of bronze, or even of gold or silver, was really only a display of greater wealth, but could not be considered in these days an advance towards securing the advantages of a comfortable, luxurious, and healthy bed.

In the early period of modern history, beds were almost universally, in Europe, nothing but bundles of straw. As late in England as the times of Queen Elizabeth, when no carpets were used, and the floor was strewn with rushes, the beds were hardly anything better, and a wooden bench, or any rude framework which lifted the bed above the floor, was a luxury. Erasmus, in his letters, describes the social condition of the people during the reign of Henry VIII, and was disgusted at the state of the floors. The rushes, he says, were so seldom changed, and became so damp, that the feet were constantly kept wet, and thence colds and consumption were quite common.

In the dining-rooms, he speaks of the filth collected on the floor among the rushes; the bits of meat and bones thrown to the dogs, who fought around the guests' legs for them; the beer and wine emptied upon the floor; the slices of bread, used as plates for eating their meat on, and then thrown aside, altogether giving us no very high conception of the neatness and fine breeding of the time.

From Delaroche's fine picture of "The Death of Queen Elizabeth," an accurate idea can be gained of the beds of royalty at this period, and consequently those of the common people can be imagined. By a careful study of the times, and from all the contemporary evidence bearing upon this point, Delaroche was enabled to reproduce the scene with a truthful accuracy of detail. The queen is reposing upon a bed formed by spreading cloths upon the floor. She is covered with richly embroidered spreads of velvet, bordered with golden fringe. The moment chosen is when she is upbraiding the Countess of Nottingham for keeping back the ring Essex had sent to his royal mistress just before his execution. The queen herself is gorgeously attired, as was her constant custom, but the comparison between the brilliant coverings of the bed and its position, one which now would be considered as in the dirt, affords an admirable picture of the partial civilization of the times, with its splendor of display and its want of the simplest decencies of the present.

Mattresses were first made of straw or wool, then moss came to be used, and feathers, and finally curled hair. The trouble with all mattresses of these materials is, that they become by use matted and hard, and have to be remade. Besides, too, all of these materials have a greater or a less tendency to retain the bodily exhalations, and in all public places, such as hotels, hospitals, and other institutions where the beds are used in turn by a number of different persons, the danger of contagion, and the difficulty in any case of keeping the beds hygienically clean and pure, according to the demands of the present medical standard, is very great, if not impossible.